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Avenger of Zendikar Discussion

2 days ago

Excellent deck! You've made me realize how much I've undervalued Mazirek. I feel like I need to reconsider him for my golgari deck... Anyhow - Have you've considered other infinite sac outlets for backup? In particular, adding a
Nim Deathmantle
to your
Ashnod's Altar
turns your
Avenger of Zendikar
and
Grave Titan
into infinite tokens and colorless mana.

Also, pairing any of these infinite sac outlets with a
Blood Artist
is devastating.

1 week ago

Uhhhh this is a really open ended question haha. You should browse the various gruul decks on here, as well as edhrec.com for ideas

I'm running
Omnath, Locus of Rage
and it's really fun. He takes advantage of something most decks do anyway: ramp. He also punishes boardwipes with his
Lightning Bolt
ability. Sometimes I'll flood the board and swing all out, then cast my own boardwipe to burn my opponent(s) for the final blow

Xenagos, God of Revels
is another commander I've used in the past. His strategy pushes more towards "going tall" with a few big creatures rather than omnath who wants to "go wide" with a pile of creatures. Xenagos is one of the best options too since he's harder to remove than normal creatures.

2 weeks ago

Hey, this is a good start and much better than the precon, good job, but I think you can take this much further even on a budget especially the manabase and creature base. There's honestly a lot of cards that I can suggest be added and cut, but instead of doing that I'll give you some suggestions of good cards to add that are included in the precon, but you're not playing them. My other suggestions are to make two of the best cards here even better. Very nice
Ulamog, the Infinite Gyre
,
Dark Depths
and
Sword of Feast and Famine
:)

Depths has very good interaction with Windgrace's -3 ability to reanimate lands, but you still have to be able to removal all the ice counters from Depths before you get Marit without having to pay each time to remove a counter. Consider adding
Thespian's Stage
? Stage can copy Depths and the copy doesn't get ice counters thus once you copy it you can sac Stage which is now Depths and get Marit. Stage is a land with Windgrace's -3 ability you can reanimate both Depths and Stage at the same time and that's powerful. Consider
Sylvan Scrying
? It's a low mana cost budget way to tutor for Depths or Stage.

Ulamog is 11 mana to cast and you want to cast him because of his powerful cast trigger. Ulamog requires a lot of ramp and cards that can search for him when you are set-up with enough mana to cast him. Cards to consider adding:

Anger
: can be discarded by Windgrace and then if you control a Mountain all creatures you control get haste. Giving Ulamog or any other win condition creature such as
Rampaging Baloths
and the Beasts it creates haste is very good. With haste Ulamog can trigger annihilator 4 the turn you play him which is busted.

These cards are not just good with Ulamog, but many other cards, they're all just good budget cards.

Commander of Landfall is my budget causal Windgrace deck. Maybe it can give you some ideas, feel free to use it as inspiration. Some differences between my deck and yours are first the manabase. I'm playing a lot more lands for landfall and I've made it a priority to play as many budget dual lands that can that ETB (enter the battlefield) untapped. I'm playing many budget duals that interact well with basic lands because the manabase has 18-20 basic lands. I've made dual lands that are two different types of lands such as
Cinder Glade
a priority to take advantage of
Farseek
,
Nature's Lore
and
Wood Elves
. These three are excellent cards for ramp because can search for and put a dual land onto the battlefield.

Green is the most important color with the most sources in the manabase to take advantage of green's ramp, more specifically one drop mana dorks. Red and black are only splashes mostly for Windgrace. Good landfall creatures or creatures who interact in some way with lands are the priority for the creature base. There's creatures that let me play an additional land per turn or can put a land from my hand right onto the battlefield; these cards are the reason for 44 lands. I've reduced the high mana cost win condition creatures to just four, who all have great interaction with lands.

I'm playing other draw sources than just Windgrace because I can't rely on him staying alive. Budget tutors are in my deck, they help me search for a specific creature. There's recursion for other cards (any card or permanents), not just lands. This lets me safely discard a card that's not a land when I use Windgrace's +2 ability because I can get the card back if I need to.

2 weeks ago

Ok--So here are a couple suggestions on lands--staples--if you will, that I include with this style deck/commander etc that I mentioned briefly above.

Fetchlands are great with Omnath and all of your creatures with Landfall like
Avenger of Zendikar
More the merrier. Some of the fetches have been reprinted, some haven't. So depending on the one you want, there could be a wide range in price. There are Budget equivalents like
Evolving Wilds
and
Terramorphic Expanse
and
Mountain Valley
there's a couple others too. These traditionally aren't as good because they only get Basic lands and they come into play tapped. However, they get the job done on Landfall triggers should you need an option while you're waiting to upgrade to that
Wooded Foothills
this one, luckily, has been reprinted in Khans block I believe. It wouldn't be a bad idea to look at a few others while we were at it though.
Windswept Heath
might be good
Blighted Woodland
and
Naya Panorama
better or cheaper options for sure.

Now-- I had thought about it some more since I commented earlier today and I have a few more suggestions. I'm just going to suggest the cards, I won't offer cuts at this time, because I'm not looking to change your deck completely, just give you some thoughts if you were wanting to tap into your Commander more or just be cool fun R/G beats deck etc. I'll leave that up to you. Happy to help in any way though.

3 weeks ago

Hey, this is a good start, but I think you're including too much fat and not enough sustenance. There's several really good cards here: Thrasios, Safekeeper, Azusa, Cobra, Baloths, Excavator, Muse, etc.
Command Tower
is however missing :) All my cards suggestions are budget ($6 or less).

Cards to cut to make 100 cards:

Baloth Woodcrasher: this is a worse Rampaging Baloths.

Arcanis the Omnipotent: too expensive card draw which you don't need because of Tatyova.

Archetype of Endurance: not worth eight mana.

Polyraptor: not worth eight mana.

Patron of the Moon: not enough Moonfolk.

Fleet Swallower

Desolation Twin

Tromokratis

Consider reducing what creatures/cards you want as your win conditions because you don't need as many win condition creatures as you have here. All the cards I suggest to cut to make 100 are high mana cost creatures to help to reduce the high avg. CMC here which is 4.2. Choose a few win condition creatures who can benefit from the strategy of playing a lot of lands before and after the creature is on the battlefield.

Avenger of Zendikar
: one of the most powerful budget win condition creatures for green with a land strategy.

I see
Thrasios, Triton Hero
and overall it's the most powerful card in the entire deck. Adapting the land strategy to also support him is a good plan to consider. Thrasios wants a combo that makes infinite colorless/colored mana because this lets you draw your deck and put all your lands onto the battlefield. Most infinite colorless mana combos consist of expensive price cards such as
Rings of Brighthearth
or
Power Artifact
with
Basalt Monolith
. There are however some budget two cards + Thrasios combos to consider:

Krosan Restorer
with threshold + enchanted with
Pemmin's Aura
or
Freed from the Real
: equals unlimited mana from tapping and untapping three lands. These auras let you untap Restorer which then lets you untap three lands gaining you two mana each time Restorer is untapped. Threshold is not difficult to enable (getting seven cards in your graveyard) with all the land ramp spells as well as Wilds, Expanse, Blighted, Bant Panorama, Ghost Quarter, etc.

Viridian Joiner
+
Umbral Mantle
+ two mana: equals infinite green mana. Tap Joiner to make one green mana use it and two additional mana to then untap Joiner giving it 3 power. Tap Joiner to make three mana then use that three mana to untap Joiner giving it 5 power. You can now tap and untap Joiner unlimited amount of times.

Umbral Mantle +
Kydele, Chosen of Kruphix
who's able to make four mana. If you have Kydele in play and draw four or more cards for the turn then you can tap and untap Kydele unlimited times with Mantle.

There are other budget infinite mana combos, but these are using cards that are fine for ramp without the combo therefore they can be used in other ways here with the land strategy.

There's a few cards to consider that can give you an advantage due to all the lands you're playing and putting onto the battlefield. These cards effect all players, but you can benefit much more from them because of the land strategy.

Overburden and Breach bounce lands that are in play back into their controllers hands this is very helpful because of landfall and you want a lot of lands in your hand to play each turn. These cards alone can really disrupt your opponents which is good for you.

Consider more lands? I suggest 42 lands. 36 lands is low for a land strategy especially when you want to be able to support landfall and play multiple lands per turn as well as use cards abilities to put lands from hand onto the battlefield. You need a lot of lands to be able to do all this each turn.

3 weeks ago

My original intent of putting in Blink, is to experiment with using that to at least save the non-token creatures and offer protection against
Cyclonic Rift
, which is rampant in my meta. While situational, an end-of-turn blink on
Avenger of Zendikar
could also mean a deadly Alpha Strike in my next turn if I can follow up with a pump spell like
Overrun
.

I've bookmarked your deck! It looks awesome from the onset, just have to see which cards are suitable for mine. Feel free to leave your suggestions on my deck page too.

I'm a great fan of MTG Muddstah and have been following him for quite awhile. I must have missed your video as I usually prioritize watching those videos which features commanders I'm playing 1st. Keep in touch and certainly looking forward to trading pointers with you! Cheers!

4 weeks ago

Thanks for the feedback!

For mana fixing: I've found that a lot of the success of the deck comes from redundancies in the land. You may not always get the
Golgari Rot Farm
needed in a clutch play, but a
Rakdos Carnarium
works just as well as the key bounceland in a pinch to put a land into hand for pitching to
Lord Windgrace
or to reset a
Glacial Chasm
. There are some slow starts, but if a single green source is present in the opening hand plus any mixture of ramp or other accelerant (even something like a
Amulet of Vigor
+ bounceland). Personally I've found the Amonkhet cycling lands (expecially
Canyon Slough
) to be a little unnecessary, especially with access to the single mana cycling lands like
Tranquil Thicket
and
Barren Moor
.

I've had a think over explore with potential additions like
Path of Discovery
because it functions particularly well with
Avenger of Zendikar
or
Worm Harvest
but I've found in a surprising amount of games (well not surprising given the deck numbers) there have been very few creatures hitting the board. This is because often other decks that focus around creatures will often overrun anything played by this deck unless you're exceptionally lucky. If anyone's had success with it I'd be more than happy to check it out.

A further addition might be
Vampiric Tutor
, but I'm waiting to trade off my visions version for an EMA before I modify the paper deck.

In a few recent games the amount of lifeloss has really start to hurt the deck, and there's been consideration about including
Radiant Fountain
as a source of repeatable lifegain.

Windgrace's Judgement - Usually in the wrong place at the wrong time, hitting too few of the necessary targets to dig this deck out of a tough spot. However it is a broad answer, which is essential to any removal suite in commander.

Tempt with Discovery
- Always better than
Hour of Promise
early game except if the table is at all wary of what the deck can do will often decline, or will not give it the time of day in the late game, making this an expensive ramp later on.

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